e-governance: challenges and opportunities

The advent of information and communication technology (ICT) together with the diffusion of the technological advances has resulted in the digital revolution and the emergence of the Information age. The revolution has created an enormous impact on social, political, and cultural livelihood of the masses - taking the whole world into a different era. Bangladesh is one of the developing countries striving strongly for nation building by leveraging ICT. Platforms for interaction amongst the Government, businesses and citizens to ensure easy accessibility of information to all levels of the society could be developed using ICT. e- Governance is the public sector's use of information and communication technologies with the aim of improving information and service delivery, encouraging citizen participation in the decision-making process and making government more accountable, transparent and effective. This paper focuses on the issues and challenges that Bangladesh currently faces in the implementation of e-Governance. Through collaborative networks of public-private partnerships we discuss how the dual problem of infrastructural barriers and weak ICT policies could be addressed. Specifically, we present a design framework to overcome these obstacles.